On Color
Meditations in Color began with a studio question: how do artists actually work with color when you look across a body of work rather than a few familiar images?
Above all, I wanted it to become a place to come and meditate in color. In the absence of a coherent collection that lets you sit with an artist's chromatic life in one field of attention, I began building the place I wanted for myself and for friends and acquaintances who had long wished for it too: somewhere to take in Matisse's colors across his works, or Bonnard's, or Morandi's, as fully as possible in one place.
What interests me is not color symbolism alone, but color in use: how it holds form, creates rhythm, establishes pressure, sets distance, and continues to operate even as subject matter, medium, and composition change around it. I return to artworks for instruction and companionship, but also to understand how color behaves once attention stays with the surface itself.
This is what anchors the project. It treats color not as an accessory to form, but as one of the ways form is made. That question began in painting, but it was never only a question about painting.
On The Archives
The project began as a digital archive and research platform spanning painters from the fifteenth century to the present. For each artist, I try to gather as much of the work as possible into one place, then build pages organized by palette, chromatic relationship, tonal range, and atmosphere.
The archive is not meant as an encyclopedia alone. It is meant as a place of looking. The point is to make artists legible through chromatic behavior: what recurs, what widens or narrows over time, what tones seem to structure an entire practice, and what colors keep returning as habits of seeing and making.
The platform is also a resource. Artists, designers, students, and general audiences can compare palettes across whole bodies of work, copy them directly for inspiration, and carry those lessons into their own practice.
The Colorist Archive, that first one, remains the center of the project. What has changed is that it is no longer the only one.
On Widening the Field
The archive started with painting because that is where I look longest. But the method turned out not to be about painting. Gather a whole body of work, read it by palette rather than by subject, and let the pattern rather than the single famous image do the talking: that works anywhere images are made in quantity by people with a consistent eye.
The Movie Poster Color Archive is the first extension of it. It reads filmographies instead of oeuvres and directors instead of painters, and in doing so it changes what the reading is about. A poster is a designed, commercial, negotiated object. Its color has to work at a distance, survive reproduction, sell a film, and sit inside the conventions of its decade and its genre. Where a painter's palette is largely a private decision accumulated over years, a poster's is a public one made under constraint, often by hands the film never credits.
That difference is the reason to build it rather than an argument against building it. Placing the two archives beside each other makes both stranger and more legible: it shows where chromatic decisions are free and where they are negotiated, and how much of what we read as an era's color is a matter of pigment, of printing, of taste, or of the market.
The Album Cover Archive is the second extension, and it reads a different kind of object again. An album cover is a container for something you cannot see. Its color does not describe its contents the way a poster describes a film or a painting describes its own surface; it stands in for sound, and the conventions for doing that were invented and re-invented decade by decade.
Its constraints are unusual. The square was fixed for half a century by the physical record and has outlived the object that imposed it. Color here often belongs to a label or a house style as much as to a musician: Blue Note under Reid Miles, ECM, 4AD and Factory each impose a palette across artists who have nothing else in common. And a cover is re-dressed over time in a way a painting never is, reissued and repackaged until several palettes claim the same record.
The archive spans a change of format rather than sitting on one side of it. Roughly seven in ten of these covers were made for an object you held at twelve inches, and the rest were made for a screen, most often at the size of a thumbnail. Whatever color does at that scale is a different job from the one the format was invented for, and having both in the same field of attention is the use of it: you can watch the constraint change and see which chromatic habits survived.
Three archives now sit beside each other: color chosen privately over a lifetime, color negotiated commercially for a single release, and color standing in for something with no appearance at all. Other bodies of work will follow; the archive was built to widen.
On Structure and Generation
My own practice runs alongside the archive, and it is built on duality. Each study sets an ordered system, a rule or a geometry, against the chance, deviation, and feeling that resist it, and holds the two in tension. The work begins in hand-drawn geometry and moves into algorithmic structure, with color present from the start as one of its materials rather than something added once the structure is settled.
When a palette drawn from a painting is set inside that system, the question becomes what survives the move and what turns into something new. Sometimes proportion carries; in other studies it is contrast, recurrence, balance, or pause. The point is not imitation but inquiry.
The Drawing System lets visitors work with those palettes directly. It offers artist-derived palettes as chromatic interpretations inside my algorithmic structures, while also leaving room for people to adapt palettes for their own experiments and, over time, build palettes of their own. In the longer term, I hope the framework can also become a scaffold through which other artists contribute their own studies to the platform. Its palettes are drawn from the painting archive; the newer archives are places of looking rather than sources for the drawing system.
It is both a surrender and a study. A surrender to the beauty and instability of color, and a study of how it survives transformation through structure and variation.
What I am ultimately working toward is a living record of how color has been used: one that can hold patterns across centuries, changes in available pigments and materials, and shifts in how visual culture organizes color over time. That record is more useful the wider it reaches, across the studio and the printed image alike. The archives and the Drawing System are parts of that same longer work.
